Awstats gives me the views to my RSS feeds. Is there any way in awstats or some other way to get information about the unique RSS aggregators that hit the feed? I care less at the moment what kind of aggregator it is (although longer term it would be beneficial to know that), I just want to know the unique aggregator hits. <br /><br />I have used Feedburner, but that is not a good permanent solution. If I am rediectng my feed subscribers to Feedburner, then I loose control if I ever want to dump Feedburner and require subscribers to change the feed address. Also, using Feedburner gives them the search engine credit for linking. <br /><br />As a workaround, I have the same feed in two directories. Users subscribe to the feed from the one directory, while Feedburner is directed to the feed in the second director. Thus, when I want to get a snapshot of my feed stats, I can redirect the subscriber feed to Feedburner, wait 24 hours or so and check the stats on feed burner, then delete the redirect. So far, it seems to work fine, but I am looking for a more permanent solution rather than having to employ this redirect. I don't think its fair to FeedBurner, either, for me to be doing this.<br /><br />Is there some other stats package out there that provides a Feedburner like tracking service, but which is installed on the server? I am not really a developer - hack at best - so I suppose creating a script that captures the header data coming from aggregator hits would work, but that is far beyond my technical capabilities and I am not sure I have the time to learn that. Thanks.<!--content-->
After some digging around, I think I somewhat answered my own question.<br /><br />First, cPanel creates a raw log file that is accessible in the main menu. I downloaded it (which is current month to date - there is a menu option to have cPanel save the last months raw log file) and unzipped and opened in Excel, after some maniuplation with delimiters to get the data parsed properly.<br /><br />This data is pretty raw, but I could do some basic sorting and find out which were the RSS readers vs. the browser clients, and, presumably, while there are multiple hits from the same aggregator, one could probably tell if its a different aggregator by looking at its correspinding IP address. Whether in Excel or MS Access, I could probably figure out how to do counts of aggregators based on different IP addresses. <br /><br />Second, since I do not have a database driven site, I learned that to track click throughs from the RSS feeds independent of a browser, I can create the feeds with the link back to my site or article in the site, but at the end of the URL in the RSS feed, attach the following: ?src=http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/rss - rss is the name I give, but it could be anything. For example, with URLs to my site from emails I send out to subscribers, I can attach the following: ?src=email. <br /><br />It appears the Awstats does not track a URL with the ?src= <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/But">http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forum ... ex.php/But</a><!-- m -->, the raw log file does, so I suppose, while a little cumbersome, I could look at my raw log file and get an idea of click throughs to my site from the RSS feed or me emails, independent of browser hits. <br /><br />So, in summary, I can get a rough idea of the unique readers that hit my feed, and get an idea of the click throughs from the URL's in the feeds.<!--content-->
After some digging around, I think I somewhat answered my own question.<br /><br />First, cPanel creates a raw log file that is accessible in the main menu. I downloaded it (which is current month to date - there is a menu option to have cPanel save the last months raw log file) and unzipped and opened in Excel, after some maniuplation with delimiters to get the data parsed properly.<br /><br />This data is pretty raw, but I could do some basic sorting and find out which were the RSS readers vs. the browser clients, and, presumably, while there are multiple hits from the same aggregator, one could probably tell if its a different aggregator by looking at its correspinding IP address. Whether in Excel or MS Access, I could probably figure out how to do counts of aggregators based on different IP addresses. <br /><br />Second, since I do not have a database driven site, I learned that to track click throughs from the RSS feeds independent of a browser, I can create the feeds with the link back to my site or article in the site, but at the end of the URL in the RSS feed, attach the following: ?src=http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/rss - rss is the name I give, but it could be anything. For example, with URLs to my site from emails I send out to subscribers, I can attach the following: ?src=email. <br /><br />It appears the Awstats does not track a URL with the ?src= <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/But">http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forum ... ex.php/But</a><!-- m -->, the raw log file does, so I suppose, while a little cumbersome, I could look at my raw log file and get an idea of click throughs to my site from the RSS feed or me emails, independent of browser hits. <br /><br />So, in summary, I can get a rough idea of the unique readers that hit my feed, and get an idea of the click throughs from the URL's in the feeds.<!--content-->